This course will provide you with an overview of the most important health challenges facing the world today. You will gain insight into how challenges have changed over time, we will discuss the likely determinants of such changes and examine future projections. Successful international strategies and programs promoting human health will be highlighted and global health governance structures will be mapped and the role of the key actors explored.

What can we do to prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases from becoming epidemics or pandemic? In this course, you’ll learn the facts about infectious diseases and medical responses. We'll focus on the public health laws and policies that provide the framework for effective prevention, like quarantine laws, drug development policies, and bioterrorism and biodefense.

March 2014 marked the starting point of the largest outbreak of Ebola virus disease in history. Although the disease seems to be on a decrease, we are not there yet and new outbreaks will surely emerge. New efforts to combat the outbreak are necessary. This is why we developed this online course about Ebola, targeted at health professionals across the world.

Learn about the evolving Ebola epidemic and its various aspects including disease prevention, management and treatment, response to the epidemic, ethical considerations, and the post-Ebola global health landscape.

This course proposes an overview of current global health challenges drawing on the insights of several academic disciplines including medicine, public health, law, economics, social sciences and humanities. This interdisciplinary approach will guide the student into seven critical topics in global health.

Often called “the cornerstone” of public health, epidemiology is the study of the distribution and determinants of diseases, health conditions, or events among populations and the application of that study to control health problems. By applying the concepts learned in this course to current public health problems and issues, students will understand the practice of epidemiology as it relates to real life and makes for a better appreciation of public health programs and policies. This course explores public health issues like cardiovascular and infectious diseases – both locally and globally – through the lens of epidemiology.

Around the world, we are increasingly socially and economically interdependent. Health on one side of the globe affects people on the other. Global health, once merely an ethical consideration, now dominates discussions and policies of global security. A diverse team of experts in this emerging field has come together to help you contextualize your experiences as a new or seasoned global health responder.

Understanding challenges and solutions to global health issues from an inter-disciplinary perspective. Global Health is a new field within public health sciences that integrates the knowledge from fields such as epidemiology, medicine, economy and the behavioral sciences. The main aim of the course, An Introduction to Global Health, is to describe and analyze variation in health between and within countries. This will provide an understanding of causes of the variation.

Why was the Ebola epidemic that started in 2013 so devastating? What can be done to control and mitigate outbreaks of new pathogens such as MERS coronavirus? Explore the science, prevention and control of epidemics in this free online course. In addition to lectures by leading scientists in this field from HKU, this course will feature panel discussions with world leading experts in epidemics, including Professor Peter Piot who is the co-discoverer of Ebola and Professor Barbara Stocking who chairs the 2015 WHO-commissioned panel that assesses WHO's response to the Ebola outbreak.